At large commercial establishments for packing and chilling fruit, vegetables or the like preparatory to shipping the same, it is customary to line the cardboard shipping container with panels of a heat insulating material, then fill the lined container, chill the produce, and thereafter insert the top panel of lining over the chilled produce followed by closing the completely lined container in readiness for storage or shipment. The lining generally comprises discrete panels of an efficiently insulating light-weight material such as styrofoam which must be arranged manually within an empty open-top container at the lining station. This step of manual lining not only requires numerous workers when the establishment has a large through-put of produce, but also entails the use of more floor space and slows the operation of auxiliary equipment such as fast moving conveyors, panel and container supplying means or the like, to the rate at which the manual workers can perform their lining tasks. In other words, the lining phase of the entire operation constitutes a `bottle-neck`, and which it is a purpose of the present invention to overcome.